


Persephone

by thinskinnedcalciumsipper



Category: Team Fortress 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-06
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-25 03:10:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4944529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinskinnedcalciumsipper/pseuds/thinskinnedcalciumsipper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>full disclosure this is literally just a dream journal entry i dreamed an entire pyro headcanon and after i wrote it all down i couldnt justify not posting it it took so dang long. theres actually MORE but i dont expect to ever finish it hehe. can u tell i didnt know to name this. can i curse on here. p.s. protect intersex!pyro AT ALL COSTS</p>
            </blockquote>





	Persephone

_They now came upon more and more of the big scarlet poppies, and fewer and fewer of the other flowers; and soon they found themselves in the midst of a great meadow of poppies. Now it is well known that when there are many of these flowers together their odor is so powerful that anyone who breathes it falls asleep, and if the sleeper is not carried away from the scent of the flowers, he sleeps on and on forever. But Dorothy did not know this, nor could she get away from the bright red flowers that were everywhere about; so presently her eyes grew heavy and she felt she must sit down to rest and to sleep._

She didn’t know, but she was born in Mexico city, in the summer of 1950; her mother had walked there from her remote cattlery town for an abortion. Her mother was thirteen. She came early, and abruptly, and were her mother a little less robust she could have killed her coming out, onto the earth floor of the cellar of a strangers estate house her mother hid in, but she did not, and her mother loved her at first sight, an insensible and wild, caustic love which ate up both the revulsion her mother had felt of her and her mothers own sense of self-preservation. Her mother elected to disappear into the city, so her child – a perversion by conception, and born witchish between her legs – should not be thrown in the river.

Her mother went to a tall stone convent on a high hill sentry above the city, where peachy mallow and black-eyed daisies grew wild, a place she retained a few dim memories of, brilliant but diffuse images she would recount in pleasant dreams for the rest of her life. The chorus of colors of sunshine in stained glass, also, which she looked at as her mother pleaded for her life, imprinted powerfully on her soft new pathology. She would love flowers and rainbows evermore.

Her mother was young enough yet to enter the orphanage, though she was expected to earn her keep, to which she was no stranger; child was largely left to a clutch of doting blackbirds. She was fortunate to be a pretty child, lovable, a giggler, born healthy and excellently formed with ten perfect teeth and black curls which touched her ears – like her mother and her mothers uncle had been, hardy and hearty.

She was fortunate; her early triumphs were constantly watched by patient matrons, who pinched her tiny paws to help her stand, coached the notes of Spanish from her brief, beatific cords – and at night, her mother returned from her laundressing to take her to their tiny straw cot beneath the stair afforded for unwed mothers; in a clay basin, she washed her, swaddled her in coarse cotton, nursed her, and sat up long into the night to look and look and look at her child, which was so expensive.

For a while, she lived very well, though she didn’t remember it. She was as happy as a cherubs clean consciousness could contain. She cried rarely, developed well, walked early. Her world was vividity and light, ceremony and hymnage, sweet milk filling her throat and her tiny, pretty, melancholy mother, who loved her so much.

By the time Dolores Haze died, she was nearly four, and the preeminent father began to express an interest to which her mother was familiar; when she was four, she sat in her homely Sunday frock outside the fathers offices in a halo of radiant rainbow light, listening to her mother raise her voice and the father bluster – wondering her thumb, she watched sunset heat and warm the colors which washed her, and she watched swan-gray smoke trickle then plume into the room, and she watched the tall wood door spill tongues of the most beautiful liquid gold fire; it licked the prisms of the rose windows she sat beneath and brilliant drops fell on her knee and thigh, and those were her first burns. She did not cry, but only looked in amazement, because she thought heaven was unweaving and spilling into her.

She was ushered out of the convent in the pandemonium of the fire; she stood on the hill where she was placed in the apricot poppies and ruby spray, witness to the wonderful fire which seemed to her new eyes a heavenly riot, jubilant, beautiful, outside of time – until deep in the night, the fire was defeated and the great cry began, and bemused and dismayed, her skirt scorched and her fat little thigh blistered and deadened, she waddled away into the wood of the city to be lost.

How she lived cannot be explained, except that really, she was such a sweet child – such a plaintive and pleasant look she had, her soft baby soprano polite and contemplative, her tears so rare and impactful – perhaps she was followed from the pyre of her cradle by an angel, or the ghost of her little mother.

Her earliest sensical memory was putting out her hand imploringly to a cup of something a strange man sitting up against a wall held to his mouth; he pinched her so hard he left black quotation marks on the pulp of her thumb, and when she cried, he hit her. She would not approach a man again for a long time.

In time, she wandered in the arms of spinsters and widows north, over field and farm into the thin vermilion aridity of the plateau, then into the desert; she came out approximately seven years old withered, thin, almost dead, in a tiny village in the toe of Texas.

In the summer of her seventh year, she emerged from the sage cloud in which she resided like a fairy at precisely the wrong instant – she was spirited away within the hour to the station of the dour sheriff, where she spent a miserable night, calculating constantly the immense might and weight of the bad-tempered man that penned her (it was about here that she began to develop her reticence of revealing her naked face – at this point, she began compulsively covering it in her hands whenever disturbed) and in the dreary, muggy morning, she was ushered onto a sour-smelling shuttle to a home in nearby Edinburgh.

That was June; it was not autumn before she was taken up, though the sisters initially despaired of homing her; for her skin was marked several times by blossoms of burns, she spoke almost no English and her history was void, but she had become a pretty child, amber and obsidian, with curls and enormous eyes, tolerant of ribbons and kisses, and she was taken up northward into the household of some kind of statesman, the son of a prominent southern progeny, who insisted upon her.

In his house, she first began to develop the uncanny sight that would distinguish her for the rest of her life; peoples intent became clear to her as their color. She developed also the ability to disappear herself, to become usual to invisibility. Her face which she now often covered in her quilt or handkerchief became divorced from her feeling; her skin became a mere frock she wore to impress. She didn’t resent it, exactly, but she wished often, when her father lay his hands on her, she could slip it off, slip out, just for a little while.

Her room was so beautiful, pink and white, lace curtains embroidered with tiny tea roses, shelves of dolls in wonderful dresses, black eyes and black hair, real porcelain tea sets, a bear too large to lift, a bedspread embroidered with stars and suidean fairies, anything she intimated desiring was delivered to her. She ate better than she'd ever eaten in her life and became quickly fattish. She began begrudgingly) to know English, her accent briskly corrected by the peevish tutors employed to torment her -- she attended a protestant church in an ugly colorless frock -- she saw poppies and mallow nevermore. The world grew dim behind her eyes. The sixties were coming.

She was twelve becoming thirteen, rising finally out of the diminutive dimensions and squeakiness which had phrased her thus far, when she returned from a frolic to the manse which held her beautiful bed, beautiful dolls, and the books and boxes of matches she'd begun to compulsively collect to find the door locked, the curtains shut, and whatever residents existing inside insensitive entirely to her increasingly frantic ringing. When the police arrived to speak to her, and offered an arm off the property, taking the red dress on her back, she wandered again into the world.

She worked in a kitchen a while, flipping burgers and dipping potato fingers in a bed of boiling oil, before it became evident to her employer she would not function in such close proximity to fire. She was dismissed, and it cost the fortunate McDonalds only the organs of an oven.

She worked then at a gas station. She impressed the owner, who thought she was a boy, by her strength, yielding docility and placid sweetness, and she was quickly taken on as a sort of apprentice mechanic -- there she learned the opening strains of engineering and chemistry – anatomy of thrones of fire. She was permitted by the elderly, soft and wanting proprietor to keep her detritus and sleep on the floor of the garage until the establishment burned down.

She grew tall, dark and dappled. Her arms became hard, her chest and stomach powerful beneath a soft pillow of fat. She grew hair.

She didn’t know, but it was her sixteenth birthday the day she first heard the echo of her mothers voice, saying a sound she did not know was her name. She was employed as a gardener at the estate she was once the child of – the only employers, it turned out, who would begrudgingly tolerate her many eccentricities – she heard her mother call her to the ground floor bay window, overlooking the pond and rose garden containing the colors she'd pined for, where she saw her father with a little girl that looked like him.

It was the day she was nearly caught setting the estate on fire. It was that night, hiding in a dark din of wires and lead in a warehouse decaying over the gulf, Ms. Pauling introduced herself to her – she believed, briefly, that wonderful, beautiful woman, appearing miraculously out of the dark wearing violet, curls and composure, a kind smile and upturned hands so clean and white and soft they looked edible – she believed she was the angel that had instructed her to remove her fathers face with the rake and set alight the house of her dolls and dresses, pleased, and prepared to deliver her from the perdition of planet earth.

She wasn’t, Ms. Pauling explained, she was only the representative of an establishment with interest in her abilities.

What abilities? she asked in Spanish, and Ms. Pauling replied in Spanish not to mind, not to worry, and wouldn't she come with her? She wasn't in trouble. Wasn't she hungry? Didn't she want to wash and have a meal? In fact, she didn't mind, but she wanted very much to hear more words from Ms. Pauling, to look longer on Ms. Pauling, and when Ms. Pauling put her hand on her arm to direct her to the towncar, she wished it would melt into and fuse with her.

It was an ugly place, the underground barracks she was delivered to, somewhere colder than she'd ever been, but she was acquainted with that, by now, with ugliness. She was given medicines that muted her terrors, her distraction, tamed the tangents of rage which had begun to seize her seemingly at random. She had been pursued by wolves in her eyes; they became lambs, bleating sweetly and yielding to her, and fire became pink flowerfall. She began at all times to hear beautiful music.

She learned arms and strategy, and her arsonry, all ready incredibly well developed for her tender age, became a marvel. It was hard work, but she enjoyed it. She didn't know, but she had inherited all of the strength and pliant athleticism of her mothers rapist.

She couldn't have known, but in mere years, she was sculpted into one of the best and brightest murderers in the world.

The time she first traveled to the fort, Ms. Pauling went with her, and as they sat up in the car chatting together, Ms. Pauling held her hand -- when she confessed she was afraid, Ms. Pauling held her body. Ms. Pauling was so small, so frighteningly thin in her hands, she didn't breath, for fear of cracking her in half. She smelled wonderful. It was Ms. Pauling that gave her her face.

Whoever was available, Ms. Pauling took her about to meet. She was afraid of her comrades, enormous and forward men, except, perhaps, the scout, too small and slight to be a man, really, to her yet. The engineer, who insisted upon shaking her hand, and touched her shoulder, she did not like.

Ms. Pauling brought her to a cubicle cut out of the concrete and called it her room -- she hugged her, again, and left her alone, and closed up like china doll in a glass cabinet, she cried, quietly, for a while -- only once before had she had her own room.

War was fun. She was very good at it very early on. She didn't notice, but she impressed and disturbed her acquaintances by her comfort in combat. She liked the energetic noise and activity -- she had never had a party, but she guessed that was what they must be like -- she liked the sport of her ax and shotgun, and she really, really liked the fire -- she found she liked the sounds men made when she met them -- she liked racing the scout, who would offer her a high five when he won -- and she really, really, really liked the fire.

She liked war, except she really didn't like the spy, who always snuck up on her, boldly grasped her, whispered intimately in her ear as he plunged something in her body which made her unendurably tired. She was meticulous in hunting him, and in applying her music machine to his beautiful skin, and sometimes the engineer -- her engineer, the one in red -- would smile wide and put up his thumb to her, and she didn't like that, either.

One day, a day they didn't play, the engineer, walking by the bay, overheard the scuffle of her refusing to undress to be examined by their doctor – a long, thin white man with an unkind, cutting look, all of which terrified her – and intercepted, raised his voice in her defense, escorted her out of his office, and contacted Ms. Pauling for her, so she supposed he was all right.

The doctor Ms. Pauling found for her was a woman, and she was so beautiful, tall, shapely, freckled, with an abundance of curly amber hair. The doctor spoke English only, but her English was different, somehow -- it was musical, and it was a womans, and she liked it very much. The doctor asked permission to touch her and when she did she was so careful, so gentle, she couldn't help but hug her.

The doctor said she was very healthy, physically. She offered her pills, she said, that would let her grow breasts.

She took them, and returned to the fort, gravid in the savage garden of her secret heart with the fervid wish she could be beautiful.

The game was changing, and so was she. She grew no taller, but broader, and the breadth was hard. A robust stolidity redefined her in the stalwart dimensions of an adult. She could almost match pace with the scout. For the first time, she realized Ms. Pauling was the size of a child. For the first time, she experienced eating until she was not hungry. For the first time, she felt no apprehension of a human man.

It was about the time the soldier began to lower his voice to an elevated bark to speak to her that she realized he was her friend. He was kind, she discovered, imaginative, like her, creative, like her, like her, he liked little animals and drawing, and like her, he sometimes perceived things only he could see. She didn't know, but the first time he took her on his back to visit heaven was the first time in her life a man touched her with her consent.

In war, she became bolder -- the soldier directed her to follow him in, and she did, and often, she lived. When the scout leapt on her in a paroxysm of triumph, she caught him easily in her arms

and when the engineer smiled at her, he couldn't see, of course, but sometimes, she smiled back.

**Author's Note:**

> darli8n ur starving this partys getting b oring lets turn it up a couple notches diamond crotches spensive scotches as it burns down my throat the more it costs the more you choke the more i love you quote: im too fancy for you let me enhance it for you i wanna drink a couple hundred grands tonight for you i want them bubbles i want them bubbles puff puff im stoned like betty rubble when we go its like twenty four karat gold that fancy shit and when we drink its like twenty four karat sips that fancy shit withewithewithewithwithewithewithe worm drink it. withewithewithewithwithwithe perm drink it. withwithewithewitheiwhteiwhte worm drink it. withewithewithewithewithewithe white powder perm


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